Will Trump Finish the Job in Iran?

"The trickiest American manipulators are crude, naive and innocent compared to their European or Asian counterparts." -- Ayn Rand, "The Shanghai Gesture"

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Writing in the New York Times, David French asks, [Can] American military excellence ... rescue [Trump] from his own impulsiveness and incompetence, when it comes to the war against Iran.

This column, which Yaron Brook mentioned in a recent podcast (0:02:00-0:50:10), discusses the problem, obvious before the first strikes to everyone except our Commander-in-Chief, of Iran's ability to close the Strait of Hormuz to shipping.

Or, in less harsh terms, although Trump was warned about this possibility, he dismissed its seriousness because he expected Iran to capitulate before doing so.

Obviously he was wrong, and his hopes -- based I surmise on his self-projection of all leaders as being mafiosi who all have their monetary prices -- that Iran will listen to his ultimatum are equally ridiculous. Trump may aspire to becoming a dictator and he may be successful as the leader of a shady enterprise, but he is too naive to appreciate what religious fanaticism is.

Aside from documenting Trump's refusal to prepare for this eventuality, French's piece is most valuable for laying out what a quick exit from this war -- which seems quite likely to me -- would mean in the future:

... Trump launched a major war on his own initiative while announcing competing and potentially contradictory war aims. Is the goal regime change? Unconditional surrender? Or is it much narrower -- the destruction of Iran's missile and drone forces, sinking its navy, stopping its nuclear program and destroying its ability to wage war through its proxy forces, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and the kaleidoscope of allied militias in Syria and Iraq.

The Iranian regime, by contrast, has a single, simple theory of victory: Survive. If the regime is still standing at the end of the conflict, then Iran lives to fight again. And if it survives at least in part through closing the Strait of Hormuz, then it knows exactly how to fight again.

Let that last bit sink in. Iran's regime has been tossed about like a rag doll, but can still, with minimal effort, cause the West a great deal of pain. If Trump allows that ability to remain, the best he would have accomplished is to buy us a few years' time before the mullahs can strike the West, as they demonstrated they could over the weekend.

Now we know Iran is already more than a regional threat, economically and militarily, that its leaders are willing to make good on that threat, and that they won't roll over and take a corrupt bargain like Trump wants them to.

I hope Trump ends up acting like he appreciates those facts, whether or not he really can.

-- CAV